These games were made for the DVD player under your television, not for a computer. There is nothing to emulate: the whole game is the menu system of a DVD, and you play it with the arrow keys of the remote. A software player that handles DVD menus does the same job.
We have 18 DVD games on My Abandonware — game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, shooting games in the Dragon's Lair manner like The Last Bounty Hunter, and a shelf of Japanese stories.
Playing one on your computer
Mount the disc image, then open it in VLC with the menus — which is not what VLC does when you simply drag the file in. Move with the arrow keys and choose with Enter.
Our downloads are disc images, .iso files of 1.5 to 8 GB inside a zip. On Windows 11, right-click the .iso and choose Mount: it appears as a drive. On a Mac, double-click it. Our page about CD images covers the other formats.
Then, in VLC, open Media > Open Disc, pick that drive, and leave No disc menus unticked. The disc starts as it would on a television.
The keys are the buttons of a remote control:
- Arrow keys move between the choices on screen.
- Enter presses the one you are on.
- Shift+M goes back to the disc menu on Windows and Linux, Ctrl+M on a Mac.
When a menu will not answer
Some discs ask for a button VLC does not have. Nothing crashes: you simply cannot reach part of the game. There are two ways round it.
The first is another player. MPC-HC (Windows) follows the DVD rules more closely than VLC and gets further on some discs. It is free and small, and it is worth trying before giving up on a game.
The second is the real thing. Burn the image to a blank DVD and put it in a set-top player: every button the game was written for is then on the remote in your hand. It is the one route with no button missing, and for a game show you want to play with other people in the room it is the right one anyway.
The Japanese discs
Eight of our 18 discs are Japanese: stories told in stills and voice, made for the DVD player and sold nowhere else. They are in Japanese, and none was translated.
Phantom of Inferno, Hourglass of Summer, Tea Society of a Witch and the others are the DVD branch of the visual novel — the same kind of story as our VNDS novels, but playing as video rather than text on a screen.
A real DVD player would refuse these discs outside Japan, because of the region code. A mounted image does not: the check lives in the player, and our files are images of the disc rather than the disc itself.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. These discs have almost nobody left behind them, and the questions they raise are about DVD players rather than about games.
The VLC documentation covers disc playback and the keys above. For a disc that answers nothing at all, burning it and using a television player settles the question.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.